The good news:
I ordered an HDD from Newegg 201305101000, and just 27 hours later it "arrived" on my patio. SUPER excellent delivery time guys!!! (both Newegg and OnTrac)

The bad news:
It arrived on the concrete patio AFTER being tossed over the 6 FOOT fence surrounding my patio. The assistant manager watched him do it and called him on it.

The delivery company was OnTrac.

He claimed that after trying, he determined I "wasn't home". I have to conclude he was lying.

Not only did the manager see him, but I was sitting about 10 feet from the doorbell and it never sounded.

I stayed in that location the entire time preparing and eating lunch from 12:30 to 13:30, covering each side of the delivery time by about 30 minutes.

He tossed the package at about 13:00 per the manager, and a 13:05 delivery is confirmed on newegg's shipment tracking page

I verified the doorbell is in perfect working order. I had also received a different order just a few hours earlier today. FedEx somehow DID manage to use the doorbell.

By the by, I'd been visually checking about every hour because Newegg shipment tracking said my HDD was "out for delivery" and I wanted to make sure I got it today. That's how I found the HDD shipping box so soon after OnTrac "dropped it off".

The thing is, even if the delivery person is too lazy, uncaring, or time-constrained to use doorbells or calling out, instead of tossing packages over the fence he could simply leave any and all of his "no one home" packages at the office...all at the same time.

Also a "super excellent job" to the packers at newegg. The HDD was packed in sufficient bubble-wrap and they made sure it surrounded the drive on all sides. It was effectively immobilized in the shipping box, thus getting maximum protection from primary G-forces (e.g. being dropped 6 feet onto concrete).

However, regardless of how well it was packed, because of OnTrac I now have to do significantly more testing than I had planned to do to verify the HDD was minimally affected by what just about every rational person would deem improper handling during shipment.

Want to enjoy fewer advertisements and more features? Click here to become a Hardware Analysis registered user.

My only question is the hard drive working? Is their any damage visible on the hard drive? How did you know that the HDD was dropped on concrete? Did you sign when you took the delivery on paper or on a touch interface GPS device.

As per my knowledge, until the product is in your hands, the company should be blamed for whatever has happened and replacement or reimbursement can be claimed. But once you signed the Product receiving form, then afterwards the product claim is on you.

Wow that sucks John I actually saw videos on youtube where it shows a delivery guy tossing a freaking LCD monitor over a fence just as you described, you ca imagine what the result was.

At least were I live UPS requires you to sign for the package. I wouldn't worry too much about damage since from your description the package was well stuffed with shock absorbing material. But still, it sucks since HDD are prone to damages in this exact situation.

Just remember if you hear any strange noises from the HDD like clicking or humming noises return thats**t ASAP. I had a 1tb Samsung Spinpoint F1 or F3 and at first it did the humming noises and it was pretty weird so I contacted Samsung and they told me it was normal and that the hard drive's speed was responsible for it, we're talking 7200rpm not 12,000! Anyway, I knew the answer was bullshit and I kept using it until it died like a month later, though they did replace it.

Good thing it was only filled with Steam games.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everything I write is Sarcasm.

How did you know that the HDD was dropped on concrete? Did you sign when you took the delivery on paper or on a touch interface GPS device...

John Albrich said:

...Not only did the manager see him, but I was sitting about 10 feet from the doorbell and it never sounded....

As stated, the assistant manager told me she watched him do it. And no, since I didn't know the delivery guy was there at the time of delivery, I never had the opportunity to sign anything. He dropped it over the fence, the assistant manager spoke with him about what he did, and then he left. I found it on the concrete about a half-hour later.

Naveen Goud said:

My only question is the hard drive working? Is their any damage visible on the hard drive?

The drive has been up and running various diagnostics 100% of the time since I received it on the 11th. No significant errors have been reported by SMART or drive diagnostic programs. This drive runs VERY quietly compared to my other 7200rpm drives, even with their acoustic management settings maximized. I think it was pretty much implied in my comments about newegg's excellent packaging that there was no physically observable damage.

BTW, the drive's seq read performance starts at ~195MB/sec at the beginning of the partition, decreasing to a low of ~83MB/sec at the end of the partition. Quite good for a $60 (on sale) 1TB 7200rpm mechanical HDD.

(Note: for a mechanical HDD, it is normal to have steadily decreasing performance as the R/W head(s) move from one "edge" of the platter(s) to the other "edge")

The landing of an airplane is basically a controlled fall. The same can be done for a parcel package, if one can achieve a precise parabolic trajectory when tossing the package to minimize the vertical impact from gravity, and instead transfer the energy to horizontal movement right after contact with the concrete surface. It can be done if the delivery guys have good education backgrounds in physics, as well as mastered the skills for precision package tossing (which requires intensive training to calibrate their muscles to use precise force for packages of different weight and sizes).

.
Update
The drive has been up and running various diagnostics/benchmark programs 100% of the time (24/7) since I received it on the 11th. No significant errors have been reported by SMART or drive diagnostic programs. No deterioration in SMART error "rate" parameters detected.

Temp and noise levels have remained low compared to other drives (comparison performed by applying same diagnostic/benchmark programs to other drives)..

Drive now on sale at Newegg for $60 (email promo price only...normally $75). Plan to buy another one. Note: I plan to include additional item(s) (e.g. a cable or two that I know will be shipped with the drive) to ensure drive gets similarly packaged. I'm concerned that if I order JUST a single HDD, the packaging won't be as protective as it was.

However, the "Seek Error Rate" is reported as a deteriorating number, but it remains within acceptable values...for now.

http://kb.acronis.com/content/9107Attribute ID: 7 (0x07)Description
Seek Error Rate S.M.A.R.T. parameter indicates a rate of seek errors of the magnetic heads. In case of a failure in the mechanical positioning system, a servo damage or a thermal widening of the hard disk, seek errors arise.Recommendations
Although this parameter is not considered critical by the most hardware vendors, degradation of this parameter may indicate electromechanical problems of the disk. Regular backup is recommended. If no other (critical) parameters report a problem, hardware replacement is recommended on mission critical systems only.

Experience shows me that many drives also do this and run OK for years. However, it is a parameter on which to keep an eye. Apparently Acronis agrees with me. Note that this is a rate value, and those do almost universally change over each sampling interval. I would expect Advanced Format drives like this to be more sensitve to thermal changes, even with adaptive electronics.

I agree with you to a certain extent that impact can be managed to a large extent, if some common sense and some knowledge of physics can be implied.

But at the same time, a delivery guy should practice some ethics and shouldn't handle the parcels in a rough way. It is a literal abuse of trust on the courier company and the people involved in the service.

So, may be John was lucky this time. But that doesn't mean that he or for that matter any person who ordered a product is going to come up with a smile in all situations.

The landing of an airplane is basically a controlled fall. The same can be done for a parcel package, if one can achieve a precise parabolic trajectory when tossing the package to minimize the...

To address both þ's and Goud's thoughts on minimizing impact:

The package was located on the concrete less than 1 foot horizontal distance from the 6 foot high fence.

That small X-axis offset strongly suggests the delivery guy failed to achieve "a precise parabolic trajectory" sufficient to "minimize" the Y-axis g-forces upon motion termination, by somehow tranferring energy from the Y-axis to the X-axis.

As another observation, it doesn't matter whether the X-axis offset is 1 foot or 100 feet, the time required to fall 6 feet vertically remains the same (in a vacuum, yada yada yada). Additionally, the patio is only about 12 feet wide, so any measures taken to minimize potentially harmful g-forces by control of parabolic trajectory would have virtually zero effect on impact forces.

I suppose one could argue that for a given horizontal distance less than H, it might be possible one could toss the package such that it just hits the door at about the N foot level and thus imparts tertiary g-force in the x-axis, and then assuming the package doesn't rotate it then falls the 6-N feet imparting tertiary g-force in the y-axis...and thus distributes the total tertiary deceleration on the package across 2 different axes (presumably reducing the possibility of device damage by assuming equal omnidirectional g-force limits on the device)...but I'll leave the calculations as an exercise to the reader. In such a case the width of the patio would of course have to be =< H.